Latest Microsoft Blogs

Back in September, we did something with Orchard that is kind of a big deal: we transferred control over the Orchard project to the community. Most Open Source projects that were initiated by corporations such as Microsoft are nowadays still governed by that corporation. They may have an open license, they may take patches and contributions, they may have given the copyright to some non-profit foundation, but for all practical purposes, it’s still that corporation that controls the project and makes the big decisions. That wasn’t what we wanted for Orchard. We wanted to trust the community completely to do what’s best for the project. This is why we organized elections for our new Steering Committee and had five members elected. Anyone who had...

The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is starting to fill up that I should start looking for gems (no pun intended) in there. You know, really useful stuff that folks might otherwise not find. I'll look for mostly open source projects, ones I think are really useful. I'll look at how they built their NuGet packages, if there's anything interesting about the way the designed the out of the box experience (and anything they could do to make it better) as well as what the package itself does.  Today, it's imageresizer . Bertrand Le Roy has long been an advocate of doing image resizing correctly on .NET and particularly on ASP.NET. Last week he posted a great post on a new library to choose...

We made a recent change to make it easy to update the NuGet documentation . In this post, I’ll cover what the change was, why we made it, and how it makes it easier to contribute to our documentation. Our docs run as a simple ASP.NET Web Pages application that renders documentation written in the Markdown format. The Markdown text is not stored in a database, but live as files that are part of the application source code. That allows us to use source control to version our docs. We used to host the source for the docs site in Mercurial (hg) on CodePlex.com . Under the old system, it took the following to contribute docs. Install Mercurial (TortoiseHG for example) if you didn’t already have it. Fork our repository and clone it to your local machine...

I’m happy to announce the release of NuGet 1.5 just in time to make sure our roadmap isn’t a liar. I won’t bore you by repeating the details of the release, but instead direct you to the NuGet 1.5 release notes . If you are running a private NuGet.Server repository, you’ll need to update that repository the latest version of NuGet.Server to connect to it using NuGet 1.5. I’ve updated our roadmap to reflect what we’re thinking about next . The next release is going to focus more on continuous integration scenarios that we’ve heard from customers, pre-release “beta” packages and multiple UI improvements such as allowing folks to disable package sources. Also, on occasion, the NuGet feature team hangs out in a home-grown IRC style web based chat...

There's some really impressive stuff happening in the .NET Community lately. Folks are reaching outside their standard built-in tools and pulling inspiration from everywhere. It's been said that (some) Microsoft developers don't like to use tools or technologies that aren't built in to Visual Studio. However, myself and others have been pushing the concept of LEGO blocks snapping together. Rather than thinking of Visual Studio as a giant single block, consider it as a small block amongst many others. Feel empowered to choose the technologies that work for you and discarding the ones that don't. I talked about this LEGO analogy in my DevDays keynote in The Netherlands earlier in the year . Snap in tools like the HTML5 Web...

I LOVE great debugging tools. Anything that makes it easier for me to make a site correct and fast is glorious. I've talked about Glimpse , an excellent firebug-like debugger for ASP.NET MVC, and I've talked about ELMAH , and amazing logger and error handler. Now the triad is complete with MiniProfiler , my Package of the Week #9. Yes, #9. I'm counting "System.Web.Providers" as #8, so phooey. ;) Hey, have you implemented the NuGet Action Plan ? Get on it, it'll take only 5 minutes: NuGet Action Plan - Upgrade to 1.4, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer . NuGet 1.4 is out, so make sure you're set to automatically update! The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is...

Scott chats with open source developer Andreas Håkansson about his .NET micro web framework called Nancy which is inspired by a Ruby framework called Sinatra. Why do we need frameworks like this? What kinds of sites and services can they support and how do they relate to ASP.NET? Links from the Show Nancy - Google Group NancyFx Home Page Nancy on GitHub - A Sinatra inspired web framework for the .NET platform Andreas on Twitter @thecodejunkie Introducing Nancy, a lightweight web framework inspired by Sinatra Nancy - Video Presentation Hello World Example public class Module : NancyModule { public Module() { Get["/greet/{name}"] = x => { return string.Concat("Hello ", x.name); }; } } Download: MP3 Full Show NOTE: If you...

Most developers I know are pretty anal about the formatting of their source code. I used to think I was pretty obsessive compulsive about it, but then I joined Microsoft and faced a whole new level of OCD ( Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ). For example, many require all using statements to be sorted and unused statements to be removed, which was something I never cared much about in the past. There’s no shortcut that I know of for removing unused using statements. Simply right click in the editor and select Organize Usings > Remove and Sort in the context menu. In Visual Studio, you can specify how you want code formatted by launching the Options dialog via Tools > Options and then select the Text Editor node. Look under the language you...

Almost two years ago, I announced the launch of http://letmebingthatforyou.com/ , a blatant and obvious rip-off of the Let me Google that for you website. The initial site was created by Maarten Balliauw and Juliën Hanssens in response to a call for help I made. It was just something we did for fun. I’ve been maintaining the site privately always intending to spend some time to refresh the code and open source it. Just recently, I upgraded the site to ASP.NET MVC 3, refactored a bunch of code, and moved the site to AppHarbor . Why AppHarbor? I’ve heard such good things about how easy it is to deploy to AppHarbor so I wanted to try it out firsthand myself, and this small little project seemed like a perfect fit. I had been working on the code...

It’s a common refrain you hear when it comes to documentation for open source projects. It typically sucks! In part, because nobody wants to work on docs. But also in part because good documentation is challenging to write. What is good documentation in the first place? The following is a list of some qualities that make for great documentation. This list is by no means complete. Good docs are… Written for the right audience Comprehensive and accurate Easily browsable and searchable Written in a clear and concise language Laid out in a readable format Versioned with the source code While it’s challenging to write and maintain great documentation, my co-worker Matthew was up to the challenge of building a simple Markdown based system to help...